Читать книгу Secret Diplomacy: How Far Can It Be Eliminated? онлайн

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However, at all times there must have existed, among the people at large and even among those playing the game of politics, men who had a natural inborn desire for truth and a simplicity of nature which brought them closer to the true underlying forces than were the common run of courtiers and politicians. The ever recurring admiration expressed for the diplomacy of Cardinal d’Orsat, the envoy of Henry IV to the Pope, indicates a real appreciation, even among the profession, of high standards of straightforwardness in diplomatic negotiations. Cardinal d’Orsat seems to have disdained all shallow devices of deceptive cleverness. He relied upon simple reasonableness and honesty in proposing an arrangement mutually beneficial, to win after others had exhausted all possible tricks and stratagems. In discussing diplomacy, Mably says that such methods alone are calculated to secure positive and permanent results while the devices of clever deceit can only serve to delay and confuse.

Several statesmen have discovered that the telling of the actual truth often exerts a somewhat befuddling effect on diplomats, so that they may easily be misled by telling them real facts which they will interpret in a contrary sense. This method has usually been associated with the name of Bismarck who on one occasion said, “It makes me smile to see how puzzled all these diplomats are when I tell them the truth pure and simple. They always seem to suspect me of telling them fibs.” The discovery had, however, been made by many statesmen before Bismarck. As early as 1700, de Torcy had arrived at the conclusion that the best way of deceiving foreign courts is to speak the truth. Lord Stanhope said quite complacently that he could always impose upon the foreign diplomats by telling them the naked truth, and that he knew that in such cases they had often reported to their courts the opposite to what he had truthfully told them to be the facts. At a later date, Palmerston also prided himself on being able to mislead by the open and apparently unguarded manner in which he told the truth. It would, however, manifestly be difficult to use this method successfully more than in spots; it would have to be interspersed from time to time with a judicious amount of prevarication, in order to throw the other party off the scent.